Fujitsu spurns small hard drives, goes solid state

Humphrey Cheung, 11th April 2007

Culver City (CA) - Fujitsu is betting everything on solid-state drives and is stopping development of small 1.8-inch magnetic drives. According to Reuters, Fujitsu executives believe that the ultra-portable laptop and consumer market could go towards the faster flash memory drives.

Fujitsu’s Masao Sakamoto told Reuters, “We want to see if the market tips towards flash.” The company faces fierce competition from rivals Toshiba and Samsung in the regular hard drive market and switching to solid-state drives (SSD) could mean better business through higher profit margins.

Fujitsu recently announced two new Lifebook tablet computers that have 16 and 32 GB SSDs as an option. Other companies are also coming out with their own solid-state enabled laptops.

Solid-state drives promise to be much faster than traditional magnetic hard drives because of lower latency and power consumption. Sandisk also offers a solid-state drive and told TG Daily at the Consumer Electronics Show that those drives could boost battery run times by a few tens of minutes.